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Story PHAM MINH QUAN
Photos INTERNET
Spring has been a favorite season for artists because of its beauty and rich symbolism. What does the winter bring If not yet another spring?
After persevering through chilly winter’s short days and long nights, spring is a well-deserved reward. The season of rebirth emerges in the smallest signs, such as a green shoot rising from the soil, a young leaf growing from trees, small flower buds beginning to bloom or flocks of birds returning under the warm sunshine. Such a dramatic transition is a visual delight for all and a particular source of inspiration for artists.
Spring has always been a favorite subject for artists because of its beauty, multifaceted nature and rich symbolism across countless cultures. In the world of art, the season has a plethora of complex connotations, including beauty, love, youth, fertility, rebirth, purity, and even the suggestion of transience and impermanence.
Perhaps the first image that spring conjures up is of colorful flowers, which frequently symbolized the promise of eternal life and the resurrection of Christ in religious paintings during the Middle Ages in Europe. A melancholy shade of spring can be found in Japanese art, on the other hand, where flowers such as cherry blossoms were especially popular in ukiyo-e artworks to represent the brevity of life.
Cherry blossoms are used to evoke sentiments of nostalgia and regret because their brief blooming period is seen as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of beauty and life: nothing lasts forever, even beauty. Weeping Cherry and Bullfinch by Katsushika Hokusai is the epitome of a fleeting moment captured in time.
Spring was also celebrated in the works of medieval and Renaissance painters, with content primarily based on mythology or the use of allegorical images of Greek and Roman goddesses. Primavera by Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, created in the late 1470s and early 1480s, is one of the best-known works about spring. Nine mythological figures appear in an orange forest in this famous painting, with the goddess Venus in the center. All around them, hundreds of different flowers bloom. The masterpiece contains an overlapping system of allegorical symbols that is still the subject of much interpretation today, with numerous details alluding to both Ancient and Renaissance poetry by Ovid, Lucretius, Poliziano and many other authors.
Spring is also frequently personified by young women full of life, taking part in seasonal social activities such as festivals and shown in the glow of love. Claude Monet painted his wife in a white dress, reading a book beneath a canopy of lilacs in the middle of a garden in Springtime (1872). The painting evokes a sense of calm and comfort with its green grass and trees, bright and warm colors, and central image of a lovely woman. Pierre Auguste Cot’s work, Springtime (1873), on the other hand, made a groundbreaking exception to the forced discretion and conservative social conventions imposed on women in the 18th century. It depicts a young girl in a flirty yet elegant outfit showing off her body hidden beneath a thin layer of fabric. However, the artist’s goal was not eroticism; rather, he wished to honor the “springtime” beauty of women, love, and the season itself.
Other Impressionist painters, such as Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, recreated spring in its purest form with outdoor scenes full of radiant and vibrant colors.
Spring in Vietnam is associated with Tet, the festival that marks the beginning of the lunar calendar’s transition period between winter and spring. Vietnamese artists’ paintings about spring, as a result, depict traditional Tet cultural practices such as festivals or family reunions with the hope of a prosperous and successful new year. A subtle symbol system is also present in colors (green sticky rice cake, red couplets), numbers (tray of five fruits, the Kitchen Gods legend consisting of two men and one woman), and shapes (square sticky rice cake representing the earth, round sticky rice cake corresponding to the dome of the sky).
Across examples from both East and West, it is clear that spring has many different meanings, especially in painting. While spring represents beauty, youth, dreams and passion, a tinge of distant memories often lingers. These memories may have been stashed away for the winter, but spring paintings preserve and awaken them to warm the soul.
